Illusion of Competence

The illusion of competence is a mistaken belief, formed during studying or learning, that a piece of material has been thoroughly learned and will be recalled successfully later, when in fact the learning is shallow and recall will actually fail. The psychologists Asher Koriat and Robert Bjork have conducted extensive research into this metacognitive failure, finding that people's ongoing judgments about their own learning, made while they are actively studying, can diverge sharply from how well they will actually perform once genuinely tested later. A major driver of the illusion is the simple strategy of rereading material, which research shows produces a feeling of growing fluency and familiarity with the text that people mistake for genuine mastery of its content, even though rereading on its own involves relatively little of the active mental reprocessing, such as retrieval practice or elaboration, that is actually required to build durable, long-lasting memory; as a result, a learner confuses the ease with which familiar material can be recognized during study, which reflects only its retrieval strength, with the separate question of whether the material has been solidly stored in a way that will support recall under real testing conditions later. Bjork and his collaborators have argued that this illusion can be substantially reduced by using study techniques that give learners more accurate feedback about their true learning state, particularly self-testing, spacing study sessions apart over time, and actively generating answers rather than simply rereading, all of which better simulate the retrieval conditions of an actual later test.